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Bad Blood

Ambrosia Health, the controversial clinic that sold transfusions of young, healthy people’s blood, has “ceased patient treatments,” according to the company’s website.

The decision to stop taking patients comes after an official statement from FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb this week, which described the company’s practices as a dangerous scam.

Dr. Acula

Ambrosia claimed its transfusions of a younger person’s blood could reverse health problems and extend a person’s life — a controversial and unproven notion.

The company never published the results of its self-funded clinical experiments, and recent evidence suggests that these transfusions could have been dangerous from the start.

Vampire Empire

It’s unclear whether Ambrosia plans to resume operations in the future or if the FDA’s warning rang the company’s death toll. Futurism reached out to the company with questions, and this article will be updated if we hear back.

Either way, the wealthy will need to get their controversial medical treatments somewhere else for the time being.

RoboCop

India just swore in its first robotic police officer, which is named KP-Bot.

The animatronic-looking machine was granted the rank of sub-inspector on Tuesday, and it will operate the front desk of Thiruvananthapuram police headquarters, according to India Today.

Action Figure

The robot was welcomed aboard with a salute from Pinarayi Vijayan, the Chief Minister of Kerala. India Today reports that the robot “responded with a perfect salute,” which presumably just means that it didn’t karate chop its own head off in the process.

Aside from the symbolic gesture of integrating robotics into the police force, KP-Bot doesn’t do much. At the moment, it can sit behind a police station’s front desk, recording complaints and directing visitors to the correct department as needed.

It can also salute at higher-ranked officers, according to India Today. In the future, it may be integrated with facial recognition software or the capability to detect bombs.

Quit While Ahead

KP-Bot is also for some reason gendered, with Assistant Deputy of police Manoj Abraham explicitly declaring that the inanimate object is a woman.

“Women empowerment and gender equality were kept in mind while deciding on the gender of the first robot,” said Loknath Behra, the Director General of Police. “Also, the fact that most front office jobs are managed by women was considered.”

End of an Error

People who use Google’s home security device, Nest Guard, got some surprising news earlier this month when the company announced that the device could now be used as a smart assistant.

That was startling because Google Assistant devices use voice recognition, and the company had never disclosed that Nests had built-in microphones. Now the search giant is admitting they do — and saying its failure to mention the microphone was an “error.”

Telescreen

According to the spokesperson, the microphones were never enabled and had been added to Nest devices in case the company decided to implement sound-based features. The spokesperson described a hypothetical use to Business Insider in which a Nest Guard might detect the sound of broken glass during a break-in.

“The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs,” a Google spokesperson told Business Insideron Tuesday. “That was an error on our part.”

Ministry of Search

Google has a fraught history with privacy advocates. In 2010, for instance, it got busted sweeping up Wi-Fi data with its Street View cars. And earlier this year, France fined the tech giant $57 million for privacy violations. And now, framing a secret microphone hidden in customers’ homes as an “error,” whether or not the microphone was active, doesn’t click.

Google acknowledging wrongdoing is a nice start, but there are no brownie points to be had for framing the company’s decision as an error only after it came to light anyway.

The Geocorona

A light layer of hydrogen atoms called the geocorona separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. And it extends far beyond Earth — much farther than previously believed.

Data collected by NASA and the European space agency’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a spacecraft that launched in 1995 to study the Sun, suggests that this gaseous layer extends up to 391,000 miles (630,000 km) from Earth — which, strikingly, is 50 times Earth’s diameter and almost twice the distance to the Moon.

Water Vapor

And that’s a big deal, because planets with traces of hydrogen in their atmospheres have a much higher chance of containing water on the surface.

“This is especially interesting when looking for planets with potential reservoirs of water beyond our Solar System,” explained Jean-Loup Bertaux, co-author of the paper on the new research and former principal investigator at ESA, in an official press release.

Empty Space

Unfortunately, those extra hydrogen atoms won’t be particularly useful for future missions to the Moon.

“On Earth we would call it vacuum, so this extra source of hydrogen is not significant enough to facilitate space exploration,” said Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute and lead author of the paper.

But they could make future astronomical observations more accurate by allowing astronomers to take the hydrogen atoms and their associated ultraviolet wavelengths into account.

The revelation symbolizes a big win for the SOHO team. “This discovery highlights the value of data collected over 20 years ago and the exceptional performance of SOHO,” said Bernhard Fleck, SOHO project scientist at ESA.

Toxic Changes

In April, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed new standards for how it studies the health impacts of low doses of chemicals, trading in a previously cautious approach for one that’s far more flexible.

On Tuesday, the Los Angeles Times published a deep dive into the work that went on behind the scenes to get this proposed rule change added to the Federal Register — and the damage it could do to public health if adopted.

Current Standard

For decades, according to the LATimes’ excellent explainer, U.S. federal agencies have adhered to what’s known as the linear no-threshold model when regulating and studying toxic chemicals and radiation. This model assumes that if a substance is harmful at any level, it’s harmful at all levels, with the level of harm increasing or decreasing depending on the level of exposure.

This model ensured that the public wouldn’t be exposed to potentially harmful substances even if research didn’t conclusively prove that a low level of exposure would, in fact, be harmful.

That was important because, in some cases, various studies of the same chemical at the same low dose have reached different conclusions. One might assert that the low dose is harmful, another that it has no effect, and still another that the dose is actually beneficial to the human body, a phenomenon known as hormesis.

Hormesis D’oeuvre

It’s true that some dangerous substances really are beneficial at low doses. Small doses of tamoxifen, for example, can help treat breast cancer, but at higher doses, the chemical can actually cause uterine cancer.

However, while hormesis might be useful in a clinical setting, it’s not an effective way to regulate chemicals that could reach the public at large, according to David Jacobs, a public health professor at the University of Minnesota.

“There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical,” Jacobs told the LA Times. “It’s not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn’t responding well.”

The Holy Grail

On April 30, the EPA posted a proposed rule titled “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science” for comment in the Federal Register. It removes linear no-threshold as the default model for estimating low-dose impacts, instead giving the EPA the authority to test other models, including hormesis.

Ten months later, the EPA has yet to announce a final date for deciding on the proposed rule. But if it’s adopted, public health experts told the LA Times they expect it to “tie the EPA up in knots” and possibly even result in new standards for everything from our air to our drinking water.

“Industry has been pushing for this for a long time,” David Michaels, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University, told the newspaper. “Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries, too.”

Full Autonomy

According to Elon Musk, Tesla’s cars are nearly ready for fully autonomous driving.

“I think we will be feature complete — full self-driving — this year,” Musk told Cathie Wood and Tasha Keeney of ARK Invest in a podcast on Tuesday. “Meaning the car will be able to find you in a parking lot, pick you up and take you all the way to your destination without an intervention, this year.”

Car Naps

By next year, you’ll be able to take a nap behind the wheel, Musk claimed in the same interview.

“My guess as to when we would think it is safe for somebody to essentially fall asleep and wake up at their destination? Probably towards the end of next year,” he said.

And he’s willing to stand by his words: “I would say I am of certain of that,” he said. “That is not a question mark.”

Big Promises

Musk is no stranger to making big promises. As it stands right now, Tesla’s Autopilot can make lane changes, and navigate highway ramps — but it still can’t handle most other roads.

Interplanetary Heritage

Right now, there’s no legal framework preventing people from destroying or selling culturally-important landmarks in space.

For instance, as space travel becomes more common, an opportunistic someone could find a way to steal and auction off the first bootprints left on the moon by Neil Armstrong, warns University of Mississippi Air and Space Law professor Michelle Hanlon in an essay published Friday in The Conversation.

Earthly Precedent

Hanlon cites damage to landmarks like the Pyramids of Gaza or Terracotta Army by tourists who break off pieces to take home as evidence that people can’t be trusted to preserve landmarks of their own volition.

“There is no law against running over the first bootprints imprinted on the moon,” Hanlon wrote. “Or erasing them. Or carving them out of the moon’s regolith and selling them to the highest bidder.”

Rising Chorus

Places like Stonehenge and ancient cave paintings are protected as part of the U.N.’s World Heritage List. If landmarks in space are to survive as more nations and companies develop the capacity to leave the planet, Hanlon believes that leaders need to be proactive and protect those landmarks before anything goes wrong.

Hanlon is just one of many to recently call for more comprehensive or updated space laws. Right now, the various laws and treaties that pertain to outer space are a bit of a mess. Hopefully, before trips to the moon become commonplace, someone can sort them out.

On Wednesday, Bloomberg published a story focused on yet another question — how should AVs interact with law enforcement? — and the solution might involving ceding control of your car to cops.

Police Power

The Bloomberg story notes the Dec. 2018 incident in which an intoxicated driver fell asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla with Autopilot engaged. The vehicle led police on a seven-minute chase down a freeway before officers were able to compel the Tesla to stop by essentially boxing it in.

This is the kind of problem AV manufactures and law enforcement want to avoid, and that could mean programming AVs to pull over as soon as they detect flashing police lights behind them, a protocol already adopted by Waymo.

Bloomberg even suggests that officers forced to exit their vehicles might be able to instruct other AVs to reroute away from an area “with a couple of taps on a handheld device.”

Driver Rights

Letting law enforcement control a car presumably owned by a citizen seems like murky legal territory.

Even if legal, it would be easy to see how some people might be opposed to police being able to give instructions to their car — especially if the car is programmed to follow police orders over that of the driver and the driver isn’t doing anything illegal.

It’s still too early to say whether any of the measures proposed in the Bloomberg piece will become the standard for navigating interactions between AVs and law enforcement. But given that we could have fully autonomous vehicles as soon as next year, we have no time to waste figuring out an answer to this lingering question.

Galaxy Fold

Korean tech giant Samsung officially announced its take on the growing foldable smartphone trend at its Galaxy Unpacked event today in San Francisco: the Samsung Galaxy Fold. The device will go on sale for $1,980 on April 26.

Serious About Multitasking

The Galaxy Fold will unsurprisingly pack some serious power, with a high resolution 7.3-inch Infinity Flex Display. When it’s folded in half — Samsung referred to that as “phone mode” — the display size is reduced to only 4.6 inches.

It’ll also pack an impressive 12 GB of RAM and 512 GB of on-board flash storage.

Three Deaf Mice

About half of the time someone is born totally deaf, it’s because of their genetic makeup. Those people are typically treated with cochlear implants, but now researchers from Europe and the U.S. are looking at gene-based treatments as well.

Deaf mice treated with a new kind of gene therapy developed the ability to hear almost as well as healthy mice, according to research published Tuesday in the journal PNAS — findings that suggest gene therapies may someday help with previously-untreatable conditions.

Ear Genes

The mice had what’s called DFNB9 deafness, the type that accounts for between two and eight percent of gene-related cases of human deafness. In DFNB9 deafness, a protein called otoferlin can’t perform its usual role of transmitting sound information gathered by the fine hairs in the inner ear.

But after altering the deaf mice’s genomes with specially-crafted viruses, the mice were able to hear almost as well as mice that were born with functioning otoferlin.

Step One

Even after altering the same specific gene in mice as what causes DFNB9 deafness in humans, it’s too soon to say that these gene-editing viruses can be used to treat people. There’s a long road between animal experiments and human clinics.

There’s more reason to be wary of this treatment. According to a conflict of interest statement in the PNAS article, one researcher from the University of Florida stands to profit if this virus-based technology takes off — so it’s worth waiting to see if the work holds up in further studies.

Social media, shopping, videos, games…these apps and websites are scientifically engineered to keep you hooked and coming back. The cost to your productivity, ability to focus, and general well-being can be staggering. Freedom gives you control. Freedomgivesyoucontrol.

When looking for a mortgage, its important to find a company that specializes in mortgages above all else, and to find a lender that can address your unique home buying or refinancing needs regardless of how unique your circumstances may be.

Freedom, generally, is having an ability to act or change without constraint. A thing is “free” if it can change its state easily and is not constrained in its present state. In philosophy and religion, it is associated with having free will and being without undue or unjust constraints, or enslavement, and is an idea closely related to the concept of liberty. A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in practice, be prevented by other forces. Outside of the human realm, freedom generally does not have this political or psychological dimension. A rusty lock might be oiled so that the key has freedom to turn, undergrowth may be hacked away to give a newly planted sapling freedom to grow, or a mathematician may study an equation having many degrees of freedom. In mechanical engineering, “freedom” describes the number of independent motions that are allowed to a body or system, which is generally referred to as degrees of freedom.”

In philosophical discourse, freedom is discussed in the context of free will and self-determination, balanced by moral responsibility.

Advocates of free will regard freedom of thought as innate to the human mind, while opponents regard the mind as thinking only the thoughts that a purely deterministic brain happens to be engaged in at the time.

In political discourse, political freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of “giving oneself their own laws”, and with having rights and the civil liberties with which to exercise them without undue interference by the state. Frequently discussed kinds of political freedom include freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of choice, and freedom of speech.

In some circumstances, particularly when discussion is limited to political freedoms, the terms “freedom” and “liberty” tend to be used interchangeably.[1][2] Elsewhere, however, subtle distinctions between freedom and liberty have been noted.[3] JohnStuartMill, differentiated liberty from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others.[4]

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explains the differences in terms of their relation to institutions:

Liberty is linked to human subjectivity; freedom is not. The Declaration of Independence, for example, describes men as having liberty and the nation as being free. Free willthe quality of being free from the control of fate or necessitymay first have been attributed to human will, but Newtonian physics attributes freedomdegrees of freedom, free bodiesto objects.[5]

Freedom differs from liberty as control differs from discipline. Liberty, like discipline, is linked to institutions and political parties, whether liberal or libertarian; freedom is not. Although freedom can work for or against institutions, it is not bound to themit travels through unofficial networks. To have liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be self-determining, autonomous. Freedom can or cannot exist within a state of liberty: one can be liberated yet unfree, or free yet enslaved (Orlando Patterson has argued in Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture that freedom arose from the yearnings of slaves).[5]

Another distinction that some political theorists have deemed important is that people may aspire to have freedom from limiting forces (such as freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from discrimination), but descriptions of freedom and liberty generally do not invoke having liberty from anything.[2] To the contrary, the concept of negative liberty refers to the liberty one person may have to restrict the rights of others.[2]

Other important fields in which freedom is an issue include economic freedom, academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and scientific freedom.

In purely physical terms, freedom is used much more broadly to describe the limits to which physical movement or other physical processes are possible. This relates to the philosophical concept to the extent that people may be considered to have as much freedom as they are physically able to exercise. The number of independent variables or parameters for a system is described as its number of degrees of freedom. For example the movement of a vehicle along a road has two degrees of freedom; to go fast or slow, or to change direction by turning left or right. The movement of a ship sailing on the waves has four degrees of freedom, since it can also pitch nose-to-tail and roll side-to-side. An aeroplane can also climb and sideslip, giving it six degrees of freedom.

Degrees of freedom in mechanics describes the number of independent motions that are allowed to a body, or, in case of a mechanism made of several bodies, the number of possible independent relative motions between the pieces of the mechanism. In the study of complex motor control, there may be so many degrees of freedom that a given action can be achieved in different ways by combining movements with different degrees of freedom. This issue is sometimes called the degrees of freedom problem.

In mathematics freedom is the ability of a variable to change in value.

Some equations have many such variables. This notion is formalized as the dimension of a manifold or an algebraic variety. When degrees of freedom is used instead of dimension, this usually means that the manifold or variety that models the system is only implicitly defined. Such degrees of freedom appear in many mathematical and related disciplines, including degrees of freedom as used in physics and chemistry to explain dependence on parameters, or the dimensions of a phase space; and degrees of freedom in statistics, the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary.

Social media, shopping, videos, games…these apps and websites are scientifically engineered to keep you hooked and coming back. The cost to your productivity, ability to focus, and general well-being can be staggering. Freedom gives you control. Freedomgivesyoucontrol.

When looking for a mortgage, its important to find a company that specializes in mortgages above all else, and to find a lender that can address your unique home buying or refinancing needs regardless of how unique your circumstances may be.

Freedom, generally, is having an ability to act or change without constraint. A thing is “free” if it can change its state easily and is not constrained in its present state. In philosophy and religion, it is associated with having free will and being without undue or unjust constraints, or enslavement, and is an idea closely related to the concept of liberty. A person has the freedom to do things that will not, in theory or in practice, be prevented by other forces. Outside of the human realm, freedom generally does not have this political or psychological dimension. A rusty lock might be oiled so that the key has freedom to turn, undergrowth may be hacked away to give a newly planted sapling freedom to grow, or a mathematician may study an equation having many degrees of freedom. In mechanical engineering, “freedom” describes the number of independent motions that are allowed to a body or system, which is generally referred to as degrees of freedom.”

In philosophical discourse, freedom is discussed in the context of free will and self-determination, balanced by moral responsibility.

Advocates of free will regard freedom of thought as innate to the human mind, while opponents regard the mind as thinking only the thoughts that a purely deterministic brain happens to be engaged in at the time.

In political discourse, political freedom is often associated with liberty and autonomy in the sense of “giving oneself their own laws”, and with having rights and the civil liberties with which to exercise them without undue interference by the state. Frequently discussed kinds of political freedom include freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of choice, and freedom of speech.

In some circumstances, particularly when discussion is limited to political freedoms, the terms “freedom” and “liberty” tend to be used interchangeably.[1][2] Elsewhere, however, subtle distinctions between freedom and liberty have been noted.[3] JohnStuartMill, differentiated liberty from freedom in that freedom is primarily, if not exclusively, the ability to do as one wills and what one has the power to do; whereas liberty concerns the absence of arbitrary restraints and takes into account the rights of all involved. As such, the exercise of liberty is subject to capability and limited by the rights of others.[4]

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explains the differences in terms of their relation to institutions:

Liberty is linked to human subjectivity; freedom is not. The Declaration of Independence, for example, describes men as having liberty and the nation as being free. Free willthe quality of being free from the control of fate or necessitymay first have been attributed to human will, but Newtonian physics attributes freedomdegrees of freedom, free bodiesto objects.[5]

Freedom differs from liberty as control differs from discipline. Liberty, like discipline, is linked to institutions and political parties, whether liberal or libertarian; freedom is not. Although freedom can work for or against institutions, it is not bound to themit travels through unofficial networks. To have liberty is to be liberated from something; to be free is to be self-determining, autonomous. Freedom can or cannot exist within a state of liberty: one can be liberated yet unfree, or free yet enslaved (Orlando Patterson has argued in Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture that freedom arose from the yearnings of slaves).[5]

Another distinction that some political theorists have deemed important is that people may aspire to have freedom from limiting forces (such as freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom from discrimination), but descriptions of freedom and liberty generally do not invoke having liberty from anything.[2] To the contrary, the concept of negative liberty refers to the liberty one person may have to restrict the rights of others.[2]

Other important fields in which freedom is an issue include economic freedom, academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and scientific freedom.

In purely physical terms, freedom is used much more broadly to describe the limits to which physical movement or other physical processes are possible. This relates to the philosophical concept to the extent that people may be considered to have as much freedom as they are physically able to exercise. The number of independent variables or parameters for a system is described as its number of degrees of freedom. For example the movement of a vehicle along a road has two degrees of freedom; to go fast or slow, or to change direction by turning left or right. The movement of a ship sailing on the waves has four degrees of freedom, since it can also pitch nose-to-tail and roll side-to-side. An aeroplane can also climb and sideslip, giving it six degrees of freedom.

Degrees of freedom in mechanics describes the number of independent motions that are allowed to a body, or, in case of a mechanism made of several bodies, the number of possible independent relative motions between the pieces of the mechanism. In the study of complex motor control, there may be so many degrees of freedom that a given action can be achieved in different ways by combining movements with different degrees of freedom. This issue is sometimes called the degrees of freedom problem.

In mathematics freedom is the ability of a variable to change in value.

Some equations have many such variables. This notion is formalized as the dimension of a manifold or an algebraic variety. When degrees of freedom is used instead of dimension, this usually means that the manifold or variety that models the system is only implicitly defined. Such degrees of freedom appear in many mathematical and related disciplines, including degrees of freedom as used in physics and chemistry to explain dependence on parameters, or the dimensions of a phase space; and degrees of freedom in statistics, the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary.